On Thu, 2 Oct 2025, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> > .XE and the other table of contents macros were added into 4.2BSD
> > outside of the tmac directory under /usr/lib/ms in 1983.
>
> I don't think the Eighth Edition Unix man(7)'s `XE` has anything to do
> with Berkeley ms's `XE`.
Ah, agreed. The v8 XE macro forcing the system eqn pipeline on
man documents is separate and totally different.
I started thinking more generally regarding lq/rq, but should
have looked again closely at v8 man.
Going back to your question specific to v8 man and BSD
ditroff man, I notice that:
- the 1C/2C v8 man macros have no shared elements
with the v7+ ms versions and are not in the ditroff
man (local/ditroff.old.{okeeffe,van}/tmac/tmac.an)
- man macros between v7 and v8 are missing all items
(lq/rq, 1C/2C, XE) in sys III (vers 1.35 198005)
and pdp11v (vers 1.37 198012)
- the BSD ditroff man is very similar to v7 with a
few minor additions of .IP for indented paragraph,
.DS/.DE compatibility with ms, and .P as an alias
for .PP
> The implementation itself is starkly different from V7 to V8. It looks
> like the people behind PWB (USG?) whacked on the man(7) package pretty
> hard, imposed their own (less readable) code style, and CSRC reimported
> it and built their innovations on that.
Anecdotally I recall mentions of pwb cutting comments from
macros and then delivering compressed versions system-wide as
fallout from efforts to speed up mm runtimes.
Definitely less readable and structured. System V Release 2
ended up shipping full macros with comments and compressed
versions without.
> By PWB I guess I mean PWB 2.0, a predecessor of Unix System III, since
> TUHS doesn't have a copy of PWB2 but does of PWB1, which appears to me
> to offer no man(7) macros as we know them at all. (That makes sense if
> PWB1 is a descendant of V6 Unix rather than V7.)
Seems reasonable. I also have never been able to find a copy of
pwb 2 anywhere. The origin point for v8 should have been around
1982 based upon 4.1BSD (1981) and using man macros from before
pdp11v (1983), but that makes the man macro omissions in 1984-85
BSD/Kent ditroff from research seem odd.
Thanks,
Dan
